Social networking systems typically provide mechanisms (referred to as channels) for members to communicate, directly and indirectly, with each other, e.g., emails, invitations, notifications, newsfeeds etc. application services of a social network system can make use of the various channels to provide useful features to the members, for example, sending out notifications about activities of a member's social connections, displaying a newsfeed of the member's activities to the member's friends, etc.
End-user devices can access a social network system via native applications or web browsers. For example, a social network system can generate dynamic social networking website for web browsers to access. For convenience, a member account usually authenticate itself with the social networking website through a web browser once, and the member account's user identifier can then be stored as a browser cookie on an end-user device's memory. The web browser can rely on the browser cookie to authenticate itself during later accessing of the social networking website. Based on the user identifier identified by the browser cookie, the social networking website can provide a set of message channels directed specifically for the user identifier. However, the use of the browser cookie limits the social networking system from providing multiple sets of message channels directed to different user identifiers.
The figures depict various embodiments of this disclosure for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles of embodiments described herein.